


A Home by Water and Stone

by Meridians_of_Madness



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Angst, Arthurnian Mythos, Aziraphale and Crowley Through The Ages (Good Omens), Finding home, Grief/Mourning, Happy Ending, Historical Antisemitism, Jewish Character, M/M, Nesting, or what I hope is nesting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-19
Updated: 2020-01-19
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:35:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22314922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meridians_of_Madness/pseuds/Meridians_of_Madness
Summary: For about nine hundred years, Crowley plans, prepares, preserves, and protects, all without any idea what he's doing or who he's doing it for.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 129
Collections: IK Shenanigans, Unbalanced Humours





	A Home by Water and Stone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SugarMagic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SugarMagic/gifts).



> Sugar, I hope your brain feels better! Thank you for welcoming me so warmly to the Discord!

Sometime in 1113, long after brave Artos and bright Guin and brilliant Llen were gone, Aziraphale and Crowley met again on the bend of the West Avon, where the deep forest still dreamed of dire wolves and cave bears.

“Well, how've you been?” asked Crowley cautiously.

“Better than I was,” replied Aziraphale.

 _Not that that's hard,_ Crowley thought.

There's a thinness to the angel's voice and even to his form, usually so stocky. He clung to his staff as if it was the only thing keeping him up, and Crowley couldn't remember the last time he looked so worn.

“I heard that there was a sighting of of the grail down by Lourdes,” said Crowley. “Wondered if that was your lot.”

Aziraphale shook his head.

“No. Not us, and never again. That's done with.” He attempted a brief smile that stung worse than the rage right after and the years of grief after that. Rage was a hammer, and grief was a veil. This was acceptance, and it stung.

“Honestly, I thought your side would be grateful. I heard that Hell cared for Artos not at all, though for Guin and Llen, perhaps a little bit.”

“They were sweet kids, all three of them. It shouldn't have happened the way it did.”

“No.”

The water rushed by, eager to join the Esk and make its way to the sea. Crowley watched Aziraphale watching it.

“Ready to go out into the world again, angel?” he asked as gently as he dared. “You've been rusticating for some while.”

Aziraphale nodded hesitantly.

“I think so. Heaven wants me south to keep an eye on some war or another, and Gabriel's losing patience by the day. I just don't like leaving her.”

 _Bury me deep and away in some little cave,_ she had said to them, _where I will hear no one cry my name like that again._

“She's not there, angel. You know that.”

“I do,” Aziraphale said, and this smile was a little more real. “And if she were, she'd probably tell me to let her alone, she's fine, she's dead, what more can happen to her?”

“She would have sworn more,” Crowley pointed out, and now Aziraphale laughed. The sound warmed Crowley in a way he didn't like to think about.

“You're right,” Aziraphale said. “But yes. Time to be getting on with things.”

“If you're going south, I'll come with you half-way,” Crowley offered. “Won't catch me going near Florence for a while, but I could stand to get over to the continent again.”

“Oh, of course,” said Aziraphale, and then he paused.

“Would you like to go see- that is...”

“I'm not the flower-leaving sort,” Crowley said, “but I wouldn't mind having a look around while you pack up.”

The cave set back in the mountain was deep and the way dark, but at the end was a candle enchanted never to burn down. There was a tolerable holiness to the place that made Crowley suspect that Aziraphale had roughed it out himself.

The plain stone casket was bare; it wasn't like she could read, anyway. Crowley laid his hand flat on the smooth surface. He tried to think of something to say, and finally shrugged.

“I'm taking him off for a while, but I doubt I'll keep him away forever. You know him. Stubborn, sentimental. Anyway. You were great fun while we had you, and I'm sorry we don't any more.”

He rapped his knuckles on the top of the casket, and he wouldn't have been surprised to hear her rap back. She was a pagan thing to the core, and no one knew where she had ended up.

At the mouth of the cave, Crowley considered for a moment, and then with a smirk, he knelt and laid his hand on the ground. It was finally warming up, and a carpet of small blue flowers spread out from his touch. They had made her sneeze something awful.

“And that's for the time you took my horse and made me walk all the way back to Camlann,” he said. “Brat.”

He took Aziraphale firmly by the hand and led him back to the main road. It was Roman work, would last out the millennium or more, and it would take them all the way to London.

*

About a hundred and fifty years later, Crowley was in the neighborhood, thought he'd drop in for old time's sake, and was furious to find a bunch of ragged holy men setting up shop. They had a few stray outbuildings raised, the foundations for an abbey staked out with string, and no, _absolutely not_.

He grabbed one of the bearded weirdos by the elbow, glaring fit to kill.

“Explain,” he said, and the man stuttered a little bit before finding his tongue.

“It is the tomb of Saint Wensley, who carried a torch to light the way of the martyrs of Freiburg.”

“It bloody-well is _not,”_ Crowley snapped. “You lot, you think you can just march up and declare any dead person a saint, don't you? What cheek!”

“It _is,”_ the man insisted. “In the sacred grotto, there is a candle-”

All right, that _was_ in fact a miracle, and Crowley thought he had better have a few words with Aziraphale about leaving those lying around. He shook his head and raised his voice to carry to the rest of the holy men.

“All right, all of you. Piss off. This is not the tomb of Saint Whatsit, you are absolutely not welcome here, and you are politely invited to decamp at your earliest opportunity, which is right the Heaven _now.”_

The one with the biggest beard and the most frenzied look in his eye came up with a scowl and an ax.

“Ours is the mission, and ours is the holy writ-”

“Yours is the big fuck-off snake,” Crowley said pleasantly.

The holy man scowled and then screamed, because that was what people did when he did his big fuck-off snake bit, and then it was a little chaotic.

He only had to eat one of them.

He wondered later that night, sitting with his back to the stone casket and the candle lighting his drinking, if Aziraphale would have _liked_ having those men there. They were his lot after all, though Aziraphale didn't really hold much with people who bathed and shaved so very little.

“He probably _would_ have liked them,” Crowley muttered angrily. “Satan, but he's been a stiff little wanker lately. _You_ know how he can get. One minute it's all _oh thank you, Crowley, you saved me, you're that word I shouldn't ever say around you,_ and the next, it's all _ooh, Crowley, I just don't know, I don't think I ought to, and me an annnngel!_ Ridiculous.”

At dawn, Crowley clambered to his feet, giving the casket a brisk pat.

“Well, I'm off. What with the way the world's going, I may not be back for a while, so you take care of yourself. I'll make sure that no one bothers your mortal remains anymore. A little confusion hex to keep away anyone who's looking for something too hard should do it. Wouldn't like it if all that talk about the queen returned was true, and you woke up to a lot of monks all over the place.”

The hex was the work of a few hours, and it took the entire stretch of the West Avon off the map. It wouldn't stop Aziraphale for more than a moment, and anyone who was looking for saints or whatever would find themselves wandering back east with a cottony taste in their mouth, unsure of what had happened.

Crowley nodded at a job well done and headed south.

-

Crowley was back earlier than he thought he'd be. It was just forty years later, he desperately needed a place to sleep, and he pulled a large stone over the cave mouth so that he wouldn't be disturbed.

“Hope you don't mind sharing,” he said with a yawn. “I won't bother you for more than a year or two...”

It was closer to three, but she had never been the selfish sort. Crowley woke up, stretched, and when he rolled the stone back, he was startled to see an encampment of people down by the river. When he went down to confront them, he was more confused than anything else, because really, no one should have been able to find this place.

“Hi,” he said, glancing around at wagons and the exhausted adults and the too-quiet children. “What're you all about?”

They were surprised to find a random stranger approaching them out of the trackless wilderness, but once he proved that he wasn't the murdering sort, they gave him the story fairly quickly. It turned out that Edward I was a prick after all, the Edict of Expulsion was a piece of crap, and these people, who weren't looking for anything more than a place where they might not get murdered by their good Christian neighbors, had found their way through the hex without a single problem.

The same wouldn't be said of anyone who was looking for them, and on his way out, Crowley wove some extra reinforcement into the hex, fencing the area off from the outside world.

“You can come and go as you please,” Crowley said to a likely looking young man who had introduced himself as Lev Chaika, “only you know. It might please you to stay put until the current trouble passes.”

“Just in time for the next to find us?” asked Lev wryly, and Crowley grinned.

“Yeah, you get it.”

Before he left, he put a little enchantment on the tomb as well to keep it better hidden. She probably wouldn't mind the company, but it had become sort of important to make sure that everything was kept in good shape for whenever Aziraphale visited.

-

Crowely came back every twenty or thirty years after that, just to say hi and check in. They were nice folks, and things never really got safe enough that he felt right scaring them away. Plus, they made this too-sweet bread that Aziraphale absolutely loved, and Lev's granddaughter beamed when he asked her to keep it up.

“Bring him here so he can try some fresh,” Dinah suggested, but Crowley shook his head.

“He'll come by some time,” he said vaguely, but he was beginning to wonder. Aziraphale had managed to tuck Camlann away, and it might be a long while before he could bear to bring it out again. That was fine. Guin wasn't missing him, and anyway, that meant that Crowley would still get that delighted look whenever he showed up with good bread.

By 1400, the community was blooming, enlarged with other folks who had reason to leave home before they were killed by their neighbors. It was a diverse lot, and Crowley reflected that for all Aziraphale's side said about being good neighbors, perhaps they should have said more about not _killing them._ Well, whatever, it was none of his business. His business was to keep up the protections, to make sure that he always picked up a loaf of bread from whatever Chaika scion was baking that year, and to occasionally talk with various town elders about improvements and advancements.

“No, you lot have got it right with the washing up,” he said as the plagues swept through. “Just keep it up, and um, maybe don't go to any major city centers.”

“ _Not_ going to be a problem,” said Miriam Chaika wryly.

“Yeah, you get it.”

In 1468, Aziraphale dragged Crowley to Holland to see a new type of ship mill there, water wheels mounted on floating platforms that easily doubled the amount of grain that could be processed. Crowley rolled his eyes, but he brought the plansnorth with him. They had been steadily clearing out the forests to make way for cropland. He missed the cave bears and the dire wolves, but he was the last one to stop progress when he saw it.

He had the occasional pang for how sneakily _good_ this all felt sometimes (kind of thrilling, kind of kinky), but given the fact that most of the ones ranged against the members of this particular community were proud Christians, he thought he could make it fly downstairs if asked, which never happened.

“They're good people,” he said, sitting on Guin's tomb. “If you want the company, I could open things up. Pretty sure they're not the type to make you into a saint or something. Just let me know.”

He paused.

“Things are a lot different now. I wonder what you would have made of it. Aziraphale's rolling along like a game little pebble, but I dunno. He gets into these... fits, you know? Just clings to stuff sometimes, as if he's afraid he's going to get swept away by it all. Sometimes it's like he thinks he's got nowhere to stand, and given Heaven, well, maybe he doesn't.”

Crowley glanced down.

“You know, you're a much better listener now than when you were alive. It's helpful sometimes but, you know, just butt in whenever, I won't mind.”

-

On a whim, Crowley picked up a couple copies of the First Folio when they came out and brought them back to the small town on the West Avon to share.

“A friend of mine really likes them,” he said. “Anyway they're popular.”

It took a few decades after that, but the town developed a thriving theater scene in addition to their already thriving Purim spiel tradition. A few people had such a taste and a talent for the theater that they started their own troupes, traveling throughout Europe and then the Americas as well, and Crowley took Aziraphale to a few of those performances, though he never quite got around to telling the angel about the connection. Somehow, he thought they weren't really ready for it.

It was around that time that Eli Chaika and some of the other community leaders came to Crowley and said that it was time for the protections to come down.

“We're grateful,” Eli said. “It's kept us safe for so long. The world is changing, however, and we must be a part of it.”

“Yeah, you get it,” Crowley said with a sigh, and brought the hexes down.

Things got busy. Time sped up, and it was the Age of Steam and then the Age of Flight. Crowley got back less, though he still managed to pick up a loaf of bread for Aziraphale whenever he came by. He lost track of who was who, and in a generation or two, he was an old family story. A generation after that, he was no one at all, and that was fine. Things were heating up below stairs, and the less anyone knew about him and what he had been up to, the better.

At the dawn of the new millennium, Crowley went up to the cave for what he suspected might be the last time. He stood by the stone casket, fidgeting a little. He felt horribly as if he were letting someone down, as if he had been called to give an accounting for a window he had not meant to break, but was surely still broken.

“Things are spinning out of control,” he said at last. “I... may not be able to make it back in any sort of timely manner, so... I know you're probably not around any more, and if you were, you'd be laughing yourself sick at me, but if you could wish me some good luck, now would be the time to do it.”

He was horrible at goodbyes. He blocked off the cave with an extra-big rock, and laid several obfuscation charms over it as well.

Then he went off to see about the end of the world.

-

Stuff happened.

He lost his best friend and found him again. He stopped time. He watched the world get saved. He saved Aziraphale, and Aziraphale saved him. There was a dinner at the Ritz, a night at his flat, a night at the bookshop, and then a long string of nights that left him blushing, tongue-tied and happier than he had ever imagined he could be.

It was about a year after that when Aziraphale started to make noises about finding a place for them.

“Oh, I want to keep the bookshop, of course, and I imagine you want to keep your flat if only to flaunt it in light of rising property costs, but perhaps it might be nice to have a place to share, something new.”

They considered a number of places where they both might be comfortable, and as Crowley skimmed the list of requirements that included _thriving theater scene,_ _good bakeries,_ and _not entirely hateful,_ he started to laugh.

“Why, my dear, whatever is the matter?”

“Nothing, nothing,” Crowley said, wiping a stray tear out of his eye. Satan's sake, how long had he known? How long as he been preparing without ever letting on that that was what he was doing? He really could be an idiot sometimes.

“Actually, angel, instead of someplace new, what do you say to some place old?”

-

Of course Aziraphale didn't give up his bookshop, and Crowley hung on to the flat in Mayfair. They had a place in the South Downs, a pensione in Florence and an elegant pied-à-terre in New York.

On the banks of the West Avon River, they also kept a stone house on the edge of a busy, bustling town. When they weren't in London, they could most reliably be found there, a well-fed man with a kindly smile trotting from the bakeries with a full paper bag and his red-haired companion, who seemed to know every stray alleyway and secret the town had to offer.

In spring, the town blooms with columbine, and it's around that time of year the local ghost makes her appearance. It is a specter of a woman with fierce eyes who walks the edge of the forest, a long spear in her hand According to the folklorists, she only shows up for a few days out of the year, almost as if she has something much better to be doing the rest of the time, but she is active when she is present.

Once or twice, ghost hunters have caught her on EVP, and if you look them up on YouTube, you can hear what they have recorded. First, there's the rustle of grass, and then there is the howl of a wind that wasn't blowing that night. As she comes through the blooming columbine, all sounds cease, and then:

“Ah-choo!”

**Author's Note:**

> -Um. Not my usual for this account...
> 
> -My take on nesting. Hope it works!
> 
> -If I fucked up anything with the Jewish history/culture bits, please let me know. i fact-checked and ran it by a Jewish friend, but I'm not Jewish and I am willing to be corrected!


End file.
